Moving to a hard paywall

@cap’n Jan 6, 2025

Along with the Pocker rollout, I’ve also decided to move to a hard paywall. This means that every new user will have to pay for their PocketHost account before they can use it. There will be a 7 day free trial, but after that, you’ll have to pay, and you will know that going in.

I dislike hard paywalls, but there is a lot of research out there suggesting that it’s best to have the price/value conversation up front. It makes you think more carefully about the value being offered and whether it’s worth paying for. Ultimately, if running PocketHost at a global scale isn’t worth it to enough people, the project will die. So I think this is a necessary step to ensure the project’s long term viability.

PocketHost has over 10,000 users and only a handful of subscribers because it’s been possible to run a free PocketHost account with virtually unlimited resources. This has been great for the community, but it’s also meant that PocketHost has been a bit of a free ride for a lot of people, while only a handful of people have been supporting all the others.